Watford Borough Council
The Watford Digital Model
Our brief
Create a digital twin to support an ambitious local plan and engage Watford’s young and time-poor population in consultations. Their planning team needed their digital twin provider to act as a guide and provide ongoing helpdesk services.
Digital Urban delivered
Having developed Watford’s digital twin, we host it remotely and support and guide their planning team to use it.
So far they have used it for policy development, as a planning decision portal; internally with their design review panel and to create immersive experiences for public consultations.
Take a look at the Virtual Reality event we created to promote their investment into new cycling infrastructure.
The digital twin has been used extensively by architect and developer partners and has enabled Watford Borough Council to consider pre-apps and full planning applications. In the future the team plan to use it for decision making, for design-codes, to plan inward investment and to further promote sustainable travel.
The Watford team can instantly access the secure data held in their model to create bespoke or automatic reports about updates and usage. Our managed service offering means that we support the team and answer queries on-demand.
Watford’s digital urban model is a great tool, helping us with our capacity studies, the development of our taller building policy, and supporting our remote design review sessions. It has helped us to have confidence and achieve better outcomes for all parties optimising the potential for each site.
Sian Finney MacDonald, Urban Design and Conservation Manager Watford Borough Council
